Four billion years, and the child who inherited the whole relay is sitting on the floor by the door, tying knots into leather.
We remember every foot before this one. The lungfish who dragged herself across the drying mud, gills burning, because the water she was born into betrayed her. The shrew who ran on soft pink toes across a night full of teeth. The one who first walked upright across the savanna, sole cracked, thorns in the heel, watching the horizon for both dinner and death.
So many of us lost feet to frost. So many of us walked until we could not, and then someone carried the rest of us.
And here you are, wrapping your feet in cured hide before you have even opened the door, before you know what the ground will be. Padding underneath. Cushioning. You have solved the ground. The thing that took the shrew, the thorn that took the runner, the ice that took the woman who kept the fire, you have simply wrapped away, and then, and we cannot get over this, you chose the color.
You looked at a wall of identical foot-armor and picked the ones that pleased you.
You do not even feel the pavement. That is the part we keep turning over, out here in your blood. Every foot before yours read the ground like scripture, every stone a warning, every mud a threat. Yours reads nothing. Yours is protected by strangers you will never thank.
Now you stand, test the weight, retie the left one tighter. Good. That is exactly the sort of small careful adjustment that got us all this far.
Go on. Walk out into your safe morning on your armored feet.
We ran a very long way so you could.